We recently formalized our engineering principles. Principles are important to guide and make people find out the best decisions, especially when faced to different situations. However, it is a waste of time for routines and common sense. That is why we also need practices to accelerate the process of making decisions. But not having principles and just practices are also bad since your team will just follow rules and don’t really think.

Practices could change over time, principles usually don’t. Have both when scaling.

Also published on Medium.